I’ve been working on a SunFire V480 system with Solaris 8 on it for some time now trying to upgrade it (and hopefully migrate it to debian).

After setting up a test machine, migrating all the applications as well as ldap, I disovered that Sun has not yet opened up the hardware enough to allow developers to have this machine work on any Linux or BSD system.

Looks like I’ll be using OpenSolaris on this machine, and never buying Sun again. 🙂

I installed Alpha 5 of Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 and have had VERY possitive results.

Fixed issues are:

Fan

After some time my laptop’s fan would turn on and off (from i8k’s 1 setting to 2) whether i8k was loaded or not (i8k would not load without force=1). It did this constantly and was very loud.

This behavior started after many kernel upgrades of 7.10. 8.04 Alpha 4 also had this problem.

The issue seems resolved; my fan stays at setting 1 (fan on low speed). I have not heard it go to setting 2 (high speed) yet, but my laptop does not usually run hotter than 40oC.

Update: i8k does not allow you to turn the fan to the second setting; the hardware seems to control when the fan is turned on high. I notice that the fan seems to respond more to the GPU’s temperature than the CPUs temperature. CPU is usually less than 40oC however, so I’m not concerned.

Sound

This was a major issue with Ubuntu. 7.10 required an option in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base (model=3stack). 8.04 did not work at all (I filed a bug report in launchpad that solved this issue).

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/186940

This latest Alpha fixed the issue.

nvidia/Compiz

I have a GeForce 8400M GS. 7.10 had issues with my card (some kernels could not handle ‘nvidia’ and I had to settle for ‘nv’). Compiz had very strange bugs too (windows could glitch up, lots of twitching when maximizing windows).

8.04 has resolved these issues (for now). Compiz is working beautifully for the first time, and ‘nvidia’ is loaded without issue.

LCD Lid stays on when closed

I noticed recently that the LCD stays on after I close the lid of my laptop. This is a waste of power, and causes the laptop to run hotter than it should.

Edit /etc/acpi/lid.sh and add the following line after /usr/share/acpi-support/screenblank